I’ll admit that I was slightly disappointed when, watching the 2026 production of I, Daniel Blake on the Northern Stage in Newcastle, I realised that it wasn’t going to be the play that I read under the table in a politics class in 2023. In Dave John’s re-imagining of the 2017 Ken Loach film about Britain’s welfare system, an Angry Man rages against ‘Him with the shaggy hair and sniggering disdain’ (Boris Johnson) and ‘trickle-down pound-shop Thatcher, lasted five minutes’ (Liz Truss). In the 2026 version, with even ‘the multi-millionaire banker man’ (Rishi Sunak) a distant memory, this section has admittedly lost its relevance. References to Tory failures have been replaced by accounts of the Labour betrayal of those hoping for change. It took me a moment to accept that the jokes that had made me fall in love with the play had been sacrificed in keeping the play a breathing dramatic indictment of the current situation of those forgotten by society.

That’s the thing about theatre: it is a breathing, organic being that has to change or become irrelevant. The best Shakespeare productions are those that reflect something in the present moment. A Richard III on tyranny or a Romeo and Juliet on a prevalent sectarian divide will speak to far more people than a traditional-values production. But these productions therefore become fragile things. A slight change in the political winds will blow the didactic message into irrelevance. This is not just the case with Shakespeare, or political productions – but all theatre in general.

“The connection between actors and audience is far more intimate than in the theatre, but it can therefore only last for an hour or two”

I cannot be on my own in experiencing a kind of post-play blues once a production is over. Last summer, I reviewed the Festival Players’ production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and my first thought on coming out of the play was simple: ‘I want to see that again.’ Alas, over the two week run, I never found anyone willing to come to see the play with me, and I had to accept that I would never get to see that specific production again.

It’s a feeling that I have every time I go to see a good production. Unlike cinema, where you have the promise of a DVD or streaming release in the following months, you step into the theatre knowing that this is a special event, existing only in this moment. The connection between actors and audience is far more intimate than in the theatre, but it can therefore only last for an hour or two – three at most.

Some plays are acutely aware of the pressures of time. Whether or not they share the authorial fascination with time found in a J.B. Priestley play, the practical constraints of theatre place a pressure on the narrative. As time in Romeo and Juliet spirals out of control, the last moments of the play can feel incredibly abrupt – especially if the production decides to edit out Juliet’s interaction with Friar Lawrence in the tomb. In a play constrained to the ‘two hour’s traffic’ laid out in the Prologue, it is clear that time is out of control, for characters, audiences and the writer alike.

“No matter how much you love a play, it has to end”

Even where the playwright does not constrain themself to a tight schedule, other considerations take the control out of their hands. Audience attention – no matter how engrossed they are – is finite. Scenes on stage tend to be significantly longer, simply because transitions take much longer. This means that the short, time-shifting scenes we expect on film are just impossible in most cases on stage. The “well-made play”, as a genre, lends itself to the strange warping of time that you experience, where individual moments feel extended whilst the play can still feel remarkably short overall. An Inspector Calls, despite its slow-paced Acts, always leaves me feeling like I’ve been short-changed, time-wise.

No matter how much you love a play, it has to end. But when their endings are strong enough, it can really leave you feeling like you want something more. As long as the play doesn’t fizzle, chances are that you will come out feeling that you want to see it again as soon as it is over. But at the same time, there is something important to be learned from the ephemerality of theatre. Political plays, and plays rooted in a specific moment, have to adapt and change between productions, lest they become obsolete. Only by not becoming obscure, by not excluding audiences through high-brow, generally illusive references, does theatre remain the vibrant, living thing that it is.

Change, adaptation and, eventually, ending is at the heart of everything that theatre is. If we embrace that, we can appreciate theatre as what it is, distinct from cinema and any other art form we love.